DOYLC

I wanted to capture the meaning of these terms because they are very important in dealing with definitions.  The terms have a formal place in logic, and are often encountered in the traditional literature.  Yet it is also fair to say that we probably all use these terms (or their synonyms) quite frequently in analytical work.  Having a good idea of what they actually mean makes them, I think, more useful tools for us. To get understandable definitions, I have used two sources: [1] C.S. Peirce's essay "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1879); and [2] Leibnitz's tract "Reflections Touching Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas" (1684).  This is because each source, in my opinion, is understandable for only two of the terms.   Here we go. Clear : A clear idea is one which is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it is met with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it. [1] Obscure : A notion is obscure when it is not sufficient to enable us to recognize the...

David Eddy kindly supplied me with the following military tale: A true story heard around the Pentagon goes like this: One reason the services have trouble operating jointly is that they don't speak the same language. "secure a building" has been found to have the following meanings... Navy would turn off the lights and lock the doors. Army would occupy the building so no one could enter.  Marines would assault the building, capture it, and defend it with suppressive fire and close combat.  Air Force, on the other hand, would take out a three-year lease with an option to buy. I think that we can all appreciate the humor in this, but must recognize that there is something deep and important about it.  But what is the moral in this tale? The story shows that "secure a building" means different things to four different groups.  In each case the term refers to a different concept.  And in each case the concept is clearly defined.  The concepts are all very dist...

In an earlier post I attempted to analyze the definition of "swap" in the Dodd-Frank Act.  I have come across some articles about the definition which are worth looking at to see if they teach us anything about definitions in general. The first is an article from Risk.net, an online magazine about financial risk management, entitled "US power bodies call for clarity on Dodd-Frank “swap” definition" (http://www.risk.net/energy-risk/news/2096674/power-bodies-clarity-dodd-frank-swap-definition).  The article was published on 2011-07-26.  It presents the opinion of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association that Dodd-Frank has defined "swap" too broadly.  The definition would include transactions "long used to manage electric grid reliability" - essentially putting a rural electric cooperative in the same category as Goldman Sachs.  These transactions are used to optimize generation resources to ensure grid reliability.  The industry wants a...

ISO 704 is a standard that has a good deal of relevance for anyone interested in definitions.  I am providing an outline of it here, so its scope can be appreciated.  Substantive discussion of the content of the standard will be provided in future posts.   The standard has been produced by ISO Technical Committee (TC) 37, which is called "Terminology and other language and content resources".  Actually the standard has been produced by Subcommittee SC1 of TC 37, which is known as "Principles and Methods".  ISO 704 existed in a previous version, that was published in 2000.  The present version of the standard is 74 pages long and can be obtained from http://www.iso.org. The abstract of the standard states: ISO 704:2009 establishes the basic principles and methods for preparing and compiling terminologies both inside and outside the framework of standardization, and describes the links between objects, concepts, and their terminological representations. ...

Definitions of concepts are extremely valuable, but are they sufficient for data management?  There seems to be a need for something more - for "data centric definitions".  By this I am referring the definition of a table, or column, or other data object in a database.  A concept definition - a full description of a business concept - is undoubtedly needed for a data object, but there is a strong case that more is required to form an adequate "data-centric definition".  I do not really like calling what I am discussing here "data-centric definitions", because a definition has traditionally been thought of as a property of a concept, not of a data object.  However, the term "data-centric definition" at least focuses us well on the area of interest, so I will keep it for now. Let us first try to discover if there is anything in logic that relates to the topic we are discussing.  And indeed there is. Definition has been part of logic since its incep...

We often use terms without fully thinking out how we are using them - particularly if abstraction is involved.  The other day I was looking at a data modeling tool, and asked a colleague "What did you put into the definition?".  It suddenly occurred to me that I was not talking about the content of the definition, but about the definition field into which I could type the content. After thinking about it some more, I realized that the definition field is a container which we are free to use as we want (at least in the tool I was working with).  So an immediate question is, how do we want to structure what goes into this field (e.g. with section headings) and what metadata about the definition do we want to put in (e.g. what person last updated it)?   Of course, the more sophisticated tools have these separate elements of the definition more explicitly segregated.  The "definition" is a set of smaller containers inside a bigger container. Perhaps this might ...

Today I spoke to the New York ERwin Modeling User Group (NYEMUG) on "Creating Great Definitions".  One question came up, which was why bother crafting definitions at all - why not simply rely on Wikipedia for them?  I suppose it could be any external source, and not necessarily Wikipedia (e.g. the Enterprise Data Management's Semantics Repository).  The way it would work conceptually would be to associate a link to Wikipedia with any term. It might be thought that Wikipedia only deals with common terms, and not specialized technical terms.  However, there are a good number of technical terms that are present in Wikipedia. My first reaction was both "yes" and "no".  "Yes" because it is simply obvious there is considerable value in Wikipedia, but "no" because Wikipedia does not understand the enterprise I work in, which ultimately supplies an enormous amount of context that influences definitions.    I will have to think about this to...